Today's Media Guardian devotes four pages to the training of journalists. I was particularly taken with Peter Wilby's contribution in which he argues that journalism cannot truly reflect society when most entrants are middle class graduates who have parents wealthy enough to fund their post-grad university courses.

This argument strikes a chord with me because I come at this from both sides, so to speak. I was a 17-year-old working class lad when I left school in my lower-sixth year to start work on a weekly paper. Now I am a 61-year-old middle class journalism professor helping students from (supposedly) well-off backgrounds to claim jobs at the expense of (poor) school-leavers.

As Wilby concedes, similar changes have happened throughout British society. University education is much more common than it was in the early 1960s. Newspapers were happy to take on teenagers because it usually involved offering them an initial six months' probation to assess whether they were up to the job. That was the equivalent of today's internships, though employers were gracious enough to pay probationers a proper wage (£6.75 in my case/ £6.15s in old money).p> It was, at best, rudimentary. Many of us quickly realised that passing the final exams was either going to prove relatively easy and/or irrelevant to our future careers. We knew that our future employment would not depend on whether we passed or not. Truanting was therefore common. Later, day-release courses were abandoned in favour of block-release courses.

But there was always a tension between the value of these well-meant, but educationally suspect, courses and the fact that editors hired staff based on an applicant's on-the-job track record. When my apprenticeship period ended and I applied to join the subs' desk at the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, the editor (Dick Parrack, since you ask), did not refer to my not having a proficiency certificate (100 wpm shorthand: failed twice).

It made a nonsense of the whole NCTJ system, of course, and reinforced the prevailing view among my contemporaries that journalism cannot be taught, it must be learned through experience. Education was bunkum. You sank or swam on the basis of your innate "talent".

In subsequent years, however, I became acutely aware of the fact - the undeniable fact - that there was a separation between (middle class) university graduates and (working class) school-leavers. The former generally worked on serious newspapers and the later on the populars. Moreover, among journalists in other media - radio and television - there was also a preponderance of graduates. It was possible for school-leavers to climb the ladder at serious papers (as Wilby records), but these were isolated examples.

I reject Wilby's view that there was a meritocracy. There was an obvious class divide that reflected the divisions in society. They were in the process of breaking down in the 1960s and would lead a generation later to the growth of university education for many more young people and a growing acceptance of the virtues of academic qualifications. The Mirror Group was the first major newspaper company to understand this, and set up a graduate training scheme based in the west country (its old students, many of whom achieved great things, are known as the Plymouth brethren).

Universities set up journalism courses too. City University in London started its post-grad course in 1976 and its alumni are widely dispersed throughout the media. Two are current newspaper editors: Will Lewis (Daily Telegraph) and James Harding (The Times). [Declaration of interest: I am a City tutor]. There are also respected courses across the country at Cardiff, Sheffield, Stirling, Bournemouth and so on. Some courses are accredited by the NCTJ, some are not. It appears to make little difference.

It is true that employers nowadays do tend to prefer graduates. Unlike the editors of my day, they clearly have a respect in general for university education and a specific respect for journalism courses. The training is good, both in practice and in theory. But, as with my probation days, employers also take precautions. They take full advantage of work experience periods to assess hopeful employees (and, in the cases of some magazines and TV outlets, it must be said that they also abuse that system too).

But, to return to Wilby's point, it does mean that working class school-leavers are being overlooked. Similarly, graduates who cannot afford to take post-grad journalism degrees also find it difficult to get a start in newspapers.

This matters because - and I echo Wilby here - "journalism's narrow social and ethnic base" means that, in "trying to understand, say, the grievances of the Muslim community or what drives inner-city youth to violence or what it's like to have children attending a 'sink school', most journalists are lost. They have no contacts and no inside information."

So what's to be done? Can we introduce positive discrimination? Wilby says that "some newspaper groups" are recruiting school-leavers. But that's too random. If we are to take seriously the exclusion of the working class - and ethnic minorities - from newspapers, then the Society of Editors, the Association for Journalism Education, the NCTJ, the Newspaper Society and Newspaper Publishers' Association need to get together to come up with a mechanism to address the problem.